Working Life versus Studentship

Everyone has been a student in their life. Probably most of us got into the working life after the collage. But some people started working earlier. I'm one of them.

About three and a half years ago, I started to college, which is Yildiz Technical University in Istanbul. And at the same time, I started to go a company which is located in same campus with the college. My purpose was to learn something about how things are going in working life.

At the beginning, I was assuming that it might be hard to accomplish. Because I was inexperienced, there were a lot of things to learn and study on. Therefore, I dealt with the company and started going there in my free time to just learn. I was going to school at the morning and after the lectures I was going to the office. About one year, I've improved my skills, learned a lot of things about web development and technologies. Then I started working there. It was my goal and I had succeeded it.

In this period of my life, I was not social. I was pushing myself to focus on web stuff and the lectures. The most of the lectures were not about Computer Engineering so that I was not studying so much for my school. After the second year of school, the lectures started getting harder and I was scared a little bit. Because meanwhile, things were different from the first year since I was an employee in the company.

If I need to compare work life and studentship, the list would be:

In studentship the only deadlines are exams. You can take a course again as many as you want. So if you fail at once, you have second, third chance. In working life, there are serious deadlines. If you can not meet the deadline, you may have serious problems with your boss, depending what you're working on.

In the college, there are a lot of societies and communities. Moreover, you can take place in organization team of professional events by joining distinguished societies such as IEEE. Meet new people, join networks. Find some hobbies. Almost in every college, there is absolutely a society that matches with one of your hobbies. In working life, you may not have this chance. So make hay while the sun shines in your college.

Keep your grades high in college. Because even I don't like, there are a lot of companies that consider about your GPA. You don't need to be college's top student but if you have high grades, it'll be good for you.

If you have a part time job like me, do not cross the lines. I mean, when you at office you should obey the office's and work life's rules. So you need to be adaptive to changing conditions.

While i was trying to adopt working life's rules, i had faced many problems. I've made a lot of mistakes. I'm sure there are more of them out there. So I can name my second year as adopting to professional work life.

Some points I note in first two years:

School comes first. The company, you work for, can teach you a lot of things but there is no company can teach you engineering. So to be a Computer Sciencist or an Engineer, you had to listen to lectures and participate in courses carefully.

To keep your health and regular sleep routine, be careful about your sleep period. If you'd like to code at night it's up to you. But in these two years i decided that if i don't have an urgent task, i prefer to sleep. And wake up early if you can. Because sunlight is important and every second of daylight should be spent carefully.

Determine a period for reading. As you can know, every morning, a new technology is being created. To keep yourself up-to-date, prepare a well-categorised bookmark list. Read news and blog sites periodically. Read new articles about computer science and technology.

Be a well-scheduled person. If you walk and chew gum at the same time, like me, you should schedule your tasks. Otherwise, you will not be able to finish your tasks on the time.

Don't take heed what other people think. Of course there will always be people who don't think in the same way you do. Once you believed an idea, do not let it go until you got it. To do so, you should be focused. You should know the pros and the cons of what you believe. You will be more tired than your colleagues, so don't make it worse by getting sad because of them.

Either you work or study, contribute to open source projects. I do not mean coding, also you can take part in translating. You can translate projects to other languages, it could be your native language. Or it could be your foreign language.

You should write in a personal blog. If you share your ideas, this means you have something to say. People read your writings and leave comments. So blog posts mean a lot than you think.

Try to create a value. The point is not owning something. Instead, the point is, to create something banausic. Doesn't matter how big it is. I don't say that i created a value, however, my goal is to create a value in every project.

And as the sentence below says, your experience is built on your mistakes. You learn a lot from them. The thing is not to afraid of doing something wrong. Before having some accomplishments, everyone gain experience by failing so many times.

"Try, push your limits. You can not realize your mistakes before you make them."